Arduino IDE

Here’s a project that you can throw together in an afternoon, provided you have the parts on hand, and is certain to entertain. Hackaday.io user [SunFounder] walks us through the process of transforming a humble cardboard box into a whack-a-mole game might be just the ticket to pound out some stress or captivate any children in the vicinity.

A multi-control board and nine arcade buttons are the critical pieces of hardware here, with wires and a USB cable rounding out the rest of the electronics. Separate the button core from the upper shell, mounting the shell in the box, and connect the button core’s LED cathode to the button’s ON terminal. Repeat eight times. Solder the buttons in parallel and add some more wire to the buttons’ ON terminals to extend their reach. Repeat eight more times.

Place the finished LED+cores into the buttons and connect their ON terminals to their respective buttons on the multi control board. Now for the hard step: use a mini-USB to USB cable to connect the controller to a computer you want to use to run the game’s code in the Arduino IDE. Modify the key-mappings and away you go! Check out the build video after the break.

You know we’re running this gigantic contest to build hardware and send someone to space, right? We’re doing community voting right now. If you’re on Hackaday.io, head over there and pick the best project. We’re giving away t-shirts and $1000 gift cards to people who vote. The drawing for this round is next Friday.

MicroPython is a pretty interesting development in the area of interpreted languages running on microcontrollers. It’s Python, the BASIC of the modern era, and now it’s being funded by the ESA. Great news, there’s going to be a port to SPARC, and it looks like MicroPython is going to be in a few satellites.

[EloquentlyMawkishBunny]’s calculator stopped working on the morning of his AP Physics test. It was the ribbon cable for the display. What did he do? He grabbed some magnet wire and made it work. If I’m reading this right, he did this the day of his AP test. Wow.

Oooohhhh, case modding. The Intel NUC is a pretty interesting platform for case modding; it’s small, and I shouldn’t have to remind anyone of all the cool case mods that were created when the Mini-ITX format gained popularity in the early ‘aughts. [Femke] got herself an Intel NUC, made a case, and the results are amazing. How’d she get that metal bowl? Metal spinning. Very cool.

As if it weren’t confusing enough in the Arduino world these days, now we’re going to have to deal with conflicting version numbers for the IDE. Yup, it’s been forked. Arduino LLC is offering a recently-updated version 1.6.3 at arduino.cc, but Arduino SRL has bumped up the version number to 1.7.0 at arduino.org. The conflict in naming and versioning has not gone unnoticed.

According to this article (Google translate here) the versions don’t differ by much, and the 1.7.0 IDE may even be a step backwards versus 1.6.3. It certainly seems to us that the majority of the active developers in the Arduino project have been sticking with [Massimo Banzi] and the Arduino LLC camp. Of course, everything’s open source and there’s nothing stopping Arduino SRL from porting worthwhile IDE changes across to their version of the codebase.

It doesn’t take a clairvoyant to sense that this may be in response to the warning about non-licensed boards that was included in the “official” 1.6.1 release. Nor does it take a psychic to foresee confusing times ahead.

If you’re interested in doing some code-sleuthing, have a look at the two versions and leave a comment below letting us know of any substantive differences you unearth.

Despite a wealth of tutorials for setting up and writing code for the ESP8266 WiFi module, there has not been much of anything on programming this cheap wireless module with the Arduino IDE. Finally, this has changed. After many months of coding, the Arduino IDE supports the ESP8266 module.

The Arduino IDE support was announced on the ESP8266 community forum. Setup is fairly simple with downloads for Linux, OS X, and Windows. This isn’t an ESP8266 shield, either: you can write code for the ESP module, connect the serial pins, and hit the program button.

The basic functions of the Arduino IDE – pinMode, digitalRead, digitalWrite, and analogRead – are available. Most of the WiFi functions work just like the WiFi shield library.

There are a few things that aren’t written yet; PWM doesn’t work, as the ESP8266 only has one hardware PWM source. SPI and I2C slave mode aren’t done yet, and uploading sketches via WiFi needs a little bit of thought. That said, this is a great introduction to programming the ESP module. If the Arduino IDE isn’t your thing, you could always do it the cool way with [CNLohr]’s programming tutorial we featured last week.